Who Turned Out The Lights?

Happy Monday!

Okay, golf fans out there, how about that U.S. Open?  Hats off to Gary Woodland, who held off the always lurking Brooks Koepka (and previous two-years-in-a-row U.S. Open winner) and fastidious Justin Rose to win his first ever major championship.

And there was hardly any bitching about the conditions of the venue, Pebble Beach, which I consider to be a good sign (i.e., no out of control rough, crazy fast greens, streaking fans…okay, that last one I made up just to see if I have your attention).

Of course, it’s kind of hard to bitch much about Pebble Beach — I’ve never been there in person, but even on TV it’s breathtaking.

Now, if you happened to be at a Target over the weekend trying to buy some merch, you might have had reason to bitch. For two days in a row, Target experienced a register outage that caused long lines and forced some customers to pay with cash.

You remember cash, right? That green stuff issued by the Federal Reserve that has pictures of past presidents and stuff on it?

Target shares are down more than 1.5% today as investors figured the missing weekend cash into the investment equation. The Wall Street Journal “Morning Download” email newsletter this morning cited Target as explaining the incident wasn’t security related, but rather blamed the outage on a data center issued related to “routine maintenance.” 

Tell me about those self-driving cars, again?  You know, the ones inextricably linked to the same clouds that are running the Target cash registers??

It could have been worse. You could have been trying to do the tango in Argentina (and Paraguay…and Uruguay…and parts of Chile…and Brazil). The power went off and left tens of millions in darkness for several hours on Sunday, and nobody seems to know why.

This as The New York Times on Sunday reported that the U.S. is escalating cyber attacks on Russia’s electric power grid and has placed potentially crippling malware inside the Russian system. Moscow responded today by saying such hacks could escalate into a cyberwar with the U.S.

Mutually assured power outages, anyone?

And on the subject of mutually assured whatever, Huawei’s CEO is doing some advance damage control on the U.S./China Chill-But-Getting-Colder trade war, explaining he expects the company’s revenues to drop $30B below forecast over the next two years.

That’s due largely to a drop of 40 to 60 million international smartphone shipments. 

I would recommend he go talk to Alexa about his problems, but according to a recent survey of 1,000+ U.S. adults, 46 percent never use voice assistants, and 19 percent use them less than once a month.

And for those who do use virtual assistants, 49 percent use them via smartphones as opposed to 18 percent on smart speakers.

Siri, tell Google Assistant to text Alexa not to bother me!

Google’s Assistant is Building An Ecosystem

I’m not at CES.

Never have been, never will be.

But I did sleep at a Holiday Inn last night.

Actually, I didn’t.

What I meant to say is I still read news coverage of CES to find out all about the great technology stuff I’m missing.

Yesterday’s blog theme was VR, so it only stands to reason today should focus on smart assistant(ce).

I’m bullish on AI for smart assistants, even if it’s just to do the simple stuff like setting timers and reminders.

I bought an Amazon Tap a couple of years ago, and I use it primarily for those reasons, and to listen to Bloomberg Radio or to play my Flash Brief.

Over the holidays, I bought my parents and sister a Google Home.  My parents use it primarily to have it make animal noises that amuse their pet schnauzer.

I tried to teach them how to use it to turn on Netflix with their voice, but that was a bridge too far. They just wanted to see what was on Netflix, and apparently that was too complicated a task for Google Home.

Which gets me to my point: Smart assistants(ce) should be easy to use, as obvious as possible, and not require a CS degree to program. How do you take a device that nobody knows how to use and for which there are no instructions, and teach them to use it.

One task at a time.

That means better tutorials, better help, and most of all, more intuitive asks of the device.

That’s why I think that Google Assistant is currently winning this race. I’ve not used Cortana much because it’s from Microsoft, and I’m not a big MS fan.

I’ve tried to use Siri, but it’s mostly frustrating.

I’ve successfully used Alexa and Google Assistant, and of them all, I’m still most bullish on Google Assistant. 

Google started harvesting voice phonemes via Grand Central and, later, Google Voice, long before most of us knew what the grand plan was.

But the grand plan seems evident to me, which was to create a clear and concise pathway between human voice requests and the AI backend required for successful task accomplishment.

They’ve mostly succeeded, although GA is still eager and still learning.

But the wide swath of announcements Google is making for Assistant at CES this week, I believe, demonstrates that GA was able to move from a far second or third very much into first place in the smart assistant race.

As one example, they’re announcing Google Assistant Connect, which allows third-party developers and manufacturers to finally join the GA party the way Alexa developers have been able to do for some time now:

Today we’re introducing a preview of Google Assistant Connect, a platform for device manufacturers to bring the Google Assistant into their products in an affordable and easy-to-implement way. Connect uses our existing smart home platform to expand to new device types while making device setup and discovery simple for people.

Assistant Connect creates opportunities to bring different types of smart devices to the market. For example, a partner could create a simple and inexpensive e-ink display that continually projects the weather or your calendar, while using Assistant Connect to deliver content from your linked smart speaker. The Google Assistant handles the higher-order computing—knowing what’s on the calendar, checking for updates, and so on. We’ll have more to share about Assistant Connect and how device makers can gain access to the technology later this year. For device manufacturers who want to learn more about how to integrate Assistant Connect, fill out this form.

This new SDK should let the genius of GA move far beyond the confines of Mountain View and into the hands of developers and device makers around the world.

But hey, you can still do the golden oldies: “Hey Google, what kind of sound does a cow make?”

If it doesn’t respond by saying “Moo,” you might just want to RTFM…if they had one!